Billy Novick

2017-18 MIT Sounding Series

“Sincerity… elegance… a lovely celebration of tunefulness”
Downbeat

The Great Clarinet Summit, 2018. Photo: Sham Sthankiya/MIT.
CAST Visiting Artist Billy Novick performs in The Great Clarinet Summit. Photo: Sham Sthankiya/MIT.
CAST Visiting Artist Billy Novick performs with Evan Ziporyn in The Great Clarinet Summit, 2018. Photo: Sham Sthankiya/MIT.

"Sincerity... elegance... a lovely celebration of tunefulness" — Downbeat

About the Performance

Billy Novick performed in the Great Clarinet Summit in 2018. He was joined by Don Byron, Evan Ziporyn, Eran Egozy, Anat Cohen and the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble & MIT Wind Ensemble led by Music Director Frederick Harris Jr. The exciting and eclectic program included a movement from Don Byron’s Concerto for Clarinet and Wind Ensemble and the world premiere of Jamshied Sharifi’s Ornament Of The World, a community play-along piece featuring all guest soloists and attending clarinetists of all ages.

Public Events

Past Events

The Great Clarinet Summit
May 11, 2018 / 8:00pm
MIT Kresge Auditorium, W16
48 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, Massachusetts

The final concert of the 2017-18 season of MIT Sounding, this unique event featured renowned clarinetists Don Byron, Anat Cohen, Evan Ziporyn, Billy Novick, and Eran Egozy along with the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble and MIT Wind Ensemble led by Music Director Frederick Harris, Jr. The exciting and eclectic program included a movement from Don Byron’s Concerto for Clarinet and Wind Ensemble and the world premiere of Jamshied Sharifi’s Ornament Of The World, a community play-along piece featuring all guest soloists and attending clarinetists of all ages.

Biography

Billy Novick is internationally recognized as a musician, performer, arranger and composer. He has toured extensively throughout North America, Europe and Asia, and has made spotlight appearances at numerous festivals, including the Kool, Newport, Edinburgh, Brecon (Wales), Marciac (France), and Breda (Netherlands) jazz festivals, as well as the Philadelphia and Winnipeg folk festivals.

As a composer, arranger or studio musician, Novick’s music has appeared in more than 100 film scores, television shows and commercials, including John Sayles’ Eight Men Out and Lone Star, Wes Craven’s Music of the Heart and The Opposite of Sex and Gary Ross’s Seabiscuit. His clarinet playing can be heard on the theme songs of the popular PBS shows Antiques Roadshow and This Old House.

Novick has composed 15 pieces for modern dance and has created two full-length ballet scores for the Washington Ballet—The Great Gatsby and Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises. Each ballet premiered to seven sold-out, enthusiastic houses at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. His jugband adaptation of Peter and the Wolf (on Alcazar Records, with Dave Van Ronk narrating) premiered in New York’s Lincoln Center in 1992, and his orchestral arrangements have been performed throughout the United States and Europe.

More at the artist’s website: Billy Novick